Wild Strawberry: Book 3 Ascent (23 page)

             
“I’m sorry.”

             
“No, I’m sorry, Jim.  Time up!  I have a splitting headache.”

             
Kate vanished, and Jim stumbled after her, not knowing where to turn or where to look.

             
He stumbled and fell headlong into the river.

             
He was drowning, the churning water foaming red.

             
He went down, once.

             
Twice.

             
The third time he did not come back up.

Summer:

Summer was the Virgin Mary; she found herself in a stable, looking down on a glowing baby.  Saint Joseph was standing behind her, with funny little horns on his head.

             
“What’s with the head?”  She asked Joseph.

             
“Oh they’re supposed to be a gift from God.”

             
“God is great, and all that,” confided Summer to Joseph, “but he does have some strange ideas about gifts.”

             
“Speaking of gifts here come the Three Kings.”

             
“I’m sure I was taught that you guys were not really kings, just wise men.”

             
The first visitor was a fat man with ermine-lined robes, “He looks like Henry VIII,”  Summer whispered to Joseph.

             
Joseph smiled, “Never heard of him.”

             
Next was a tall, slim, dark-skinned figure in an elaborate Egyptian headdress.

             
“King Tut,” explained Joseph with a nod.

             
Next they heard a roar from outside the stable and the pounding of huge feet.

             
“I get it,” said Summer wearily, as a huge ape-face peered into the stable, “King Kong.”

             
The giant ape plucked Summer from her seat in the stable and carried her off.

             
In the ape’s fist she was squeezed painfully hard.

             
She couldn’t breathe.

             
“Hey,” she yelled, beating at the apes fist, but the creature did not seem to notice.

             
Her breath was gone, and she knew only darkness.

Rob:

Rob dreamt he was back in the Service Station with Helena.  She was approaching him, walking slowly, swinging her hips, dressed only in stockings suspenders and a basque.

             
“No, no, you look lovely.  It’s just that I’m more attracted to men.”

             
“You’re telling me you’re gay?”

             
“Yes, I’m sorry; if I was into women you’d be the top of my list.”

             
Helena shrugged, “I always wanted to try a fling with a woman, you know: women are softer and they smell better.”

             
Rob shrugged, “Gay men smell good.”

             
“Yes, but as my attempted seduction illustrates, it’s not so easy to get to fuck a gay man.”  Helena laughed, “I can be a man for you if that’s what you want.”

             
Rob looked at the black, lacy panties she was wearing, and to his amazement saw a penis growing, uncoiling like a snake inside them, then becoming hard, forming a tent in the fabric.

             
Her other features were still feminine: “Would you like a flat, hairy chest.”

             
“Actually,” said Rob, “I quite like your breasts, but this is just a bit too weird for me.”

             
“But I want you, Rob,” Helena’s arms were outstretched.

             
“Sorry Helena, you know I would have gone mad without you, all those weeks surrounded by those things, but I really can’t help you out here.”

             
“But I want you Rob,” Helena’s eyes pleaded, while the end of her newly-grown cock poked up obscenely over the top of her skimpy knickers.

             
Rob felt sick, but this was way beyond an unwanted advance, and there was something wrong.  As realisation dawned he noticed that Helena’s skin had taken on the mottled appearance of the dead; she was reaching for him.

             
“I want you Rob!”

             
Her long, feminine, painted finger nails were like talons, capable of tearing his flesh.

             
“I need you Rob!”

             
Her red lips looked bloodstained, hungry.

             
“I need you now Rob!”

             
Helena’s mouth opened impossibly wide.  She (or was it
he
now?) was about to swallow him whole.

Elsbeth:

Elsbeth dreamt she was back in her house before the End of the World.  She delighted in every small detail, every picture that hung on the wall, every thread in her large, feather-stuffed sofa.

             
She had a sense of foreboding, knowing it would not last much longer.

             
As she watched her sofa began to twitch.

             
The seams of the cushions unravelled and out poured thousands of crawling, wriggling maggots.

             
Blue and black moulds bloomed on her wallpaper, and her pictures were streaked with damp stains.

             
She ran to the kitchen cupboards to look for cleaning materials, but when she opened them more maggots spilled onto the floor, an unstoppable, wriggling tide.

The Scientist:

The Scientist could not sleep.  He had not been able to sleep since he had died.  He would sometimes try to spend night times lying still, eyes closed, in an attempt to give his brain time without fresh stimulation in order to process the day’s events.  He wondered if the lack of sleep was contributing to his loss of mental abilities.  He hoped it was, because the alternative: that his brain was slowly rotting in his skull, was too horrible to contemplate.

             
He had to tape his headphones to his ears at night.  He wouldn’t do it by day as that would prevent him from hearing.

             
He gave up trying to sleep and returned the lab.  He was sure everything would work.  He was also sure that this would kill him along with the other zombies.  He thought he should have something more profound to do during his last night on the planet, but he was a man out of time.  He had already died, he was nothing more than an echo, a ghost: his last night on earth had passed long ago.

             
But his legacy would be to create a world at peace.

Power Struggle

“We need to get outside and check the tower,” said the Scientist, “the monsters don’t notice me, so if you agree, I’ll do it.”

             
The Scientist had no difficulty sneaking out of the door of the Bunker.  The surrounding area seemed more than usually bustling with the dead.  Recent activity may have drawn attention away from the Bunker door, but it had attracted every zombie in the area to the industrial estate where the Bunker had been set up.

             
The Scientist decided to walk a few blocks away and set off several car alarms, before walking back to the now quieter Bunker.

             
Once he returned he tried to examine the Transmitter Tower.  The problem was a box of wiring that had been forced open during Will’s fatal fight with the zombie when installing the solar panels.

             
The Scientist tried to rejoin wires that had been torn apart, but found that his fingers were numb and clumsy and he wasn’t able to perform the simple task.

             
“Shit!”  He persisted for two hours, fumbling with his pale, dead hands.  His fingers felt like cold meat.

             
He adjusted the positioning of the solar panels so the trip wasn’t a total waste of time, and trudged back down to the Bunker door dejectedly.

             
“Sorry, I couldn’t do it.”

             
“Shit, you mean we can’t do it.”

             
“No, no, it’s just that
I
can’t do it,” the scientist held up his numb fingers, “I’ve lost fine motor control.  The job looks pretty straightforward, just reconnecting some wires that have been knocked loose.”

             
“How do we get someone up there?”

             
“We could make a tent-tunnel,” suggested Summer, “sew some sheets together and tie them to some posts.  If the zombies can’t see us, we can creep up and fix it.”

             
They began work on the tent-tunnel immediately, Elsbeth sewing with great skill and speed.

             
Once they were ready they decided to make their move.

             
“Max, are you going to join us?” Asked Jim.

             
“Sorry, I’m doing some research on whether the nanites deep inside the creatures will be affected.  There’s a chance they could reactivate themselves after a time if every nanite is not switched off.”

             
Within two more days they were ready.

             
The Scientist set up the tunnel made of sheets and bed-frames.  It took the best part of the day to construct it.  Since his hands were not as nimble as they had been while alive, it was dark by the time he had finished lashing together the bed-frames, poles and sheets.

             
The scientist surveyed his handiwork and recalled an artist who had built curtains over hillsides and through unexpected places.

             
The tunnels of sheets certainly looked out of place, but hopefully not to the eyes of the undead.

             
It was now getting too dark to work, so the Scientist anchored everything down as well as he could and then went inside to join the others and get ready for a day of work tomorrow.

*  *  *

There was a chorus of singing.  It was the dead, they were singing “
We’ll meet again
.”

             
Summer was walking freely among them.  She wondered why they didn’t attack her.

             
“Am I dead?” She wondered out loud.

             
One of the zombies stopped singing and turned to her: she was a middle-aged woman, who looked very like her old English teacher,  “Oh no, we will eat you all soon enough, we don’t need to attack you in dreams.”

             
She felt a sudden pain in her hand.

             
“How many fingers an I holding up?” the zombie asked.

             
Summer saw that the zombie held in her hand a dozen or so severed human fingers.

             
“Take one, you’ll need it.”

*  *  *

The next day they shared breakfast in near silence.  Every time anyone had left the safety of the Bunker in the past there had been an anxious mood.  However, on this occasion they had two advantages: the tunnel and a sentient zombie on look out.  Despite these advantages, the mood was still unsettled.  They were quieter than usual, though in these days of rationing no one was off their food.

             
They would go out singly, there was no need to take any unnecessary risks.  Rob knew some electronics, and if the Scientist could guide him he thought they should have no problem.

             
However as soon as they opened the door of the Bunker they realised it would not be as easy as they had hoped.

             
A strong wind had almost completely blown the sheets off the frame.  It would take some time to fix them back in place.

             
As well as the wind which had picked up overnight, driving rain had made the sheets wet.

             
“We can do it,” the scientist soothed, “it’s better to be slow and do it right than to rush and endanger us all.”

             
So they waited and the scientist fixed the covered tunnel.  He worked laboriously and painfully slowly with his numb hands.

             
Eventually Rob was able to walk along the tent-tunnel and examine the wiring.